Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday January 30, 2014 @04:03AM
from the say-my-name dept.

gallifreyan99 writes "The real revolution in drugs isn't Silk Road—it's the open web. Thanks to the net, almost anyone with a basic handle on chemistry can design, manufacture and sell their own narcotics, and in most cases the cops are utterly unable to stop them. This piece is kind of crazy: the writer actually creates a new powerful-but-legal stimulant based on a banned substance, and gets a Chinese lab to manufacture it."

that fails to satiate the power grab of being able to arrest dissenters at any time for having a tiny bit of drug planted on or near them by the Powers That Be.

They can just plant a pirated movie. Stiffer fine. Point is, the arguments for criminalization are based on a lie: Properly regulated, there wouldn't be any more harm from most of these drugs than what you can do getting piss drunk.... which is legal. Until they ban alcohol, anything less dangerous than that is a disengenuous argument; It's hypocricy.

Oh, it's an egregiously sloppy law, leaving the power of selective enforcement right in the hands of people who really shouldn't be trusted with safety scissors, much less discretionary state force; but that's part of why I'm skeptical that this exercise in analog production is 'legal'. No way is the multinational-supply-chain-chemical-industry going to approve of meddling DEA agents getting in the way of business, so it's probably pretty low risk; but it would take some serious doing to come up with a psychoactive variant of a banned substance that doesn't fall within scope, if somebody notices.

The drug war leads to the cartels in Mexico being stronger than the government. When the mexican drug cartels start overtaking the US, the way the British drug dealers overtook China... then you will wish that they had have been defeated by the simple economics of regulation.

The drug war leads to children having easier access to illegal substances like meth and heroin than legal substances like alcohol. Drug dealers don't check ID, and have there is no disincentive to sell to them... they're already breaking the law. The three drug addicts I know all started these drugs when they were 15 or younger.

Drug wars cannot work, because drug demand is inelastic. This simply means that demand does not change very much with regards to price (including other costs such as legal consequences)... Where there is demand, there is supply... All the drug war does is line the pockets of violent criminals. Drug use does not decrease significantly as price increases, and conversely, does not increase significantly when it decreases... You would not expect everyone to start using heroin if it was made legal. Only an hypocritical idiot like you would claim you would begin using heroin if it was legal. Truth is, I really doubt you would.

Philip K Dick wrote most of his books high on amphetamines... Your statements about these drugs destroying focus are provably false.

The problems of addiction are merely exacerbated by the legal environment, the high cost and illegality leads to greater crime, mostly acquisitionary. You understand that addiction, once satiated, is no longer the concern of an addict? You are addicted to food, for example, if food was hard to come by, you will do anything to get it, including theft and violence... when it is easy to obtain, you have the ability to focus on other things. This is why the Swiss harm reduction experiments (giving heroin addicts heroin) seem to work so well... Addicts were able to return to work and function once their addiction was satiated.

There is no drug that is safer under prohibition. There are no gangs that are weaker under prohibition. There are police less corrupt under prohibition. There are no fewer victims of theft and violence under prohibition.

No one should be denied the right to do with their own body as they desire... until they harm another. If you don't regulate the supply side, you still deny that right... Portugal is only a step in the right direction.

> every single problem you can find with fighting hard drugs is smaller than the negative effects of hard drugs themselves (heroin, cocaine, meth)

Every single problem with hard drugs (heroin, cocaine and meth) is smaller than the negative effects of fighting them.

You actually think that bloggers murdered by mexican drug cartels are worse than an individual who chooses to take heroin... That is stupidity of the highest level.

> we can of course find bad tactics in fighting hard drugs, and we should

There are of course negatives associated with being addicted to drugs, even if they were medically pure and provided free of charge... We should help those addicts who chose of their own free will to seek help.

> addiction to hard drugs destroys lives. this is the primary and ultimate problem. if you don't understand that problem as the root cause of everything else, you're an idiot on the subject matter

My experience has been that being forced into prostitution and being controlled by criminal gangs with no morality to obtain your drugs to be far worse than the addiction itself.

My property being stolen to fund prohibition prices is worse than addiction.

Again... if you start with the axiom that addiction is the worst thing in the world, you will always end up with result that anything addictive is the worst thing in the world. Once you realise that addiction is easily satiated, then where are the real problems?

Remember, addiction simply means being willing to do anything to satiate that desire. You simply want addicts to crawl over more broken glass, then point to all the cuts and blood to prove the problems of addiction. Remove the glass and the problems of addiction become far less.

Some of my best friends are drug addicts, heroin, meth and crack... Their problems appear to come entirely from the current legal environment, that their suppliers are all criminal gangs, and the inflated prohibition prices requiring prostitution and theft to fund. When they have their drugs, they harm no one. If their drugs were available at pharmaceutical prices and purity, their problems would be diminished a thousand fold.

On the bright side, keeping drugs illegal keeps the illegal prostitutes desperate and cheap... This is what you want, right?